


teeth to glass

by bodysnatch3r



Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [3]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:47:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24526363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: His mother dies. He kills her. His mother dies. He killed her. Where speech fails there remains an echo of his innocence, soaked in blood.His mother dies. He kills her. She forgives him.WARNINGS: Mention of violence, death. Graphic depiction of gunshot wounds.
Relationships: Gabrielle Deschain & Roland Deschain, Gabrielle Deschain & Roland Deschain & Steven Deschain, Gabrielle Deschain/Steven Deschain
Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725325
Kudos: 3





	teeth to glass

“Do you understand, then, what you’ve done?”

Where there’s rustle of pages there cannot be words. Words have no room here. Words have no weight, no colour, no conscience. Words are what breath is not: meaning. Meaning, beyond the arbitrary significance of ribcages lifting lowering, catching oxygen, keeping alive.

Words cannot be denied. Words are a sacred, terrible thing. Words unlike breath have finality, for breath is gone by sunset, and with them heart. But words demonstrate the true futility of time. Where breath fails to ensure eternity, the poets have already won.

“Steven. I be talking to you.”

“Bob, if I no longer had command of my own faculties, I’d make sure you’d be the first to know.”

“That ain’t what Handsome's saying, Steve. Come now.”

_Come now_. Steven arches an eyebrow -- because either Kit picked that up from him or he from Kit. That brief consideration pressed to the wider still plane of his thoughts. How often they’d all shared words, broken them amongst each other with their crumbs on their hands, wiped the red stains from the cup of shared wisdom. What point is there in defining this vocabulary of blood? It’s been so long, anyway. Where did the first word originate between them, how can that even be quantified? In the womb, in the web, in the heart of the Tower. Perhaps there. Impossible to know with any surety, impossible to deny when presented with the facts, the true witnesses of hearts. Like the great first breath of Gan, so the cycle repeats itself even in small bursts, of mannerisms and friendship. Whoever made the world made them, too, and made them in its image. To repeat is to share. To share is to break bread, be holy with love. An act of creation with every shared glance. So the web tightens. So it always, always tightens.

“The boy’s been given the guns, Steve. There ain’t no turning back from that.”

“Yes. I know, Kit. I believe I am aware of the implications. I was the one who made the decision, after all.”

Robert scoffs and moves, away from the slit window he was leaning his back against, with his arms crossed. As he walks towards Steven’s desk, the light drips through to frame him as he is, tall and barrel-chested, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His ceremonial cape’s folded neatly on one of the chairs in the study. The glint of the rings on his hands taps against the bridge of Steven’s nose and trembles across his forehead, as Robert splays his palms on the wood to lean forward. He throws shadows onto Steven’s workspace, and Steven pulls back, pen still in hand, to frown.

“All things can be read two ways,” Robert says, ignoring Steven’s furrowed brow and the way he caught his breath about to protest, “and by Gan’s sake, Steve, the first reading of it is clear to me. Word will reach Farson soon, if it hasn’t already, now she’s back.” _Too far_. In the blue glint under Steven’s brow, Robert swallows and corrects his course, “and all I can see is him and his mongrels saying that this be you renouncing dinh-ship in all but name. That you recognise you're unworthy of the Eld’s guns. That a _boy_ , no matter how fucking talented, be _more worthy_ of those guns than the dinh of our own fucking city.”

“When my father, Clearing take him, bequeathed me the horn, ’twas not seen as an act of cowardice.”

Kit’s turn: he rolls his eyes. “Now you’re just being deliberately obtuse. The horn ain’t the _guns_ , no matter the siguls that’re written on it. And Henry didn't have Farson to contend with.”

They know that twitch, imperceptible, that comes with the jaw clench, the way it circles the right eye, the way the mouth twists slightly, the way it is like the shadow of something unknown and terrible, _terrible_ , underneath the edge of the water. They know it. He sets his pen down, and exhales hard enough to make his upper lip tremble.

“You could’ve at least discussed it with us, Steven. Before making the decis--”

“Here is my second reading, Robert. Thee’s said it yourself, there’s always two sides to all things. All world is _prophecy_ to thee, ka-mai, and riddle. You’ve given me one reading, and _damn_ those who choose to read it that way. But I won’t have you two clucking like hens or courtiers. I carried thee, Robert, didn’t I? When the poison was making you vomit your own fucking blood, didn’t I promise thee I’d have you see our white spires once more, and the Lady Louise? Didn't I hold fast to that promise? Was I not _dinh_ to thee then, as I am now?”

Robert steps back. The desk creaks when he lets it go, the sound dusty, dry. Old. He and Kit exchange a look. The look of children. At times the truth is in Steven Deschain's eyes a brilliant silver, ice-cold. The truth of fathers, and of kings.

He’ll have them beside him, and he’ll have them behind him, but to have them in front of him, three angles of a shape, is as difficult now as it ever was. With an exactness Steven understands as thin as the sharp edge of his hunting knife, Robert speaks the truth that _ka_ tells him, which is not the truth of kings but the truth of fools. One side, another side, one base. Reality made _dim_ when all can be read, even the things beyond its shimmering veils, and nothing extrapolated, and its truth, as always, a matter and manner of perspective. What else can they do? Their very language an ocean of meanings, branches holding words that are everything, and nothing as a consequence. Under the yoke of their roles their skin trembles a terrible colour. Not black nor crimson-red nor white. A person can get lost in these winds of meaning. Where the holiness of their roles ends is where the true unknown begins, where beyond the meaning of their power, White-keepers, lies something that raises much too much dust and is unclear and therefore cannot be read. In the West slowly does the low hum of war welcome violence. And it will be a wave soon enough. And it will be thunder.

DA. DATTA. DAYADHVAM. DAMYATA.

“So here is your damnable second reading. The guns be instruments of _cam_ , and they be forged from the Eld's sword.”

“We don't need a history lesson, Steven.”

“I won't take kindly to being interrupted right now, Kit.”

Kit opens his mouth to retort. And Kit closes it.

“And Roland be of my blood. Of _Eld_. And no matter what storm is coming, blood don't lie. It never has. Sometimes it be the last thing we have left. I gave him the gu--”

“You gave him the guns because you ain't stretching the power _thin_ , but you're reinforcing it. Spreading it out, so it covers more ground. Like a girdle. Because if ka let Ro pass his test of manhood so early, it means there be greater things in store for him yet. And _blood don't lie_.”

Robert knows then from the expression Steven pulls that Steven had not realised that, either. He barks out a laugh, at Steven's startled eyes, at his slow blinking.

“Yes. Yes, Bob. I suppose you're right.”

He marvels. It is something the barracks never took from him and never will. Robert Allgood marvels, in the simplest ways, at the simplest things. And he marvels now when the reasoning behind Steven's gesture unravels in his and his dinh's hands, and he marvels not at the riddle solved or at the the way power tonight has been vested, transformed and transmitted, but rather at the web of meanings that he can see, now, beneath all the things, beneath the truths they've shared. Where the water flows, the rock breaks. Where the wind blows, the tree yields.

But it is not Robert who names it. It is Christopher.

“Aven kas.”

Where ka dictates, the wind follows. Here now real more than ever, more than anything. More than them and their words and their guns, and their eyes and their father's faces. A strength that breathes in everything there is. In another world, it is called _synchronicity_. A thin dim border, trapped between coincidence and fate.

“Ai. Aven kas.”

Kit uncrosses his arms to say something, but the knock on the door interrupts him. Steven furrows his brow. It's late, and those who know him and his character know not to disturb him when in a meeting with his tet. Especially this eve, as he gets ready to go and fetch Roland to bring him to the club. For the first time. A boy of only fourteen.

“Who is it?”

“Rosalie, dinh-sai.”

It barely sounds like her. A tremble that's never there in the way she says _dinh_. The three of them exchange a glance.

“What is it, Rose?”

“Sai, may I come in? It-- it's urgent.”

He opens the door to wide eyes, and a face that still hasn't understood in full what its mouth will have to say now. When Steven sees her, Rose doesn't speak for a few seconds. Her jaw is trembling.

“What fashes thee, girl?” Kit asks from behind Steven, a sentence he's never had to say to Rosalie who told them of their sons' death with a closed jaw and cold eyes. But now, past her dinh's shoulder, she barely knew he was there, knew it but only on the surface level of things. What is inside her knows nothing but how to speak the words and then everything else, perhaps, will return after the shock has slipped back inside her.

If Cort saw, he'd beat her black and blue.

“ _Rosalie_.”

Her dinh calls her terror to order.

“It's... it's the Lady Gabrielle, sai. I don't know how to say it. Belle found them, I-- and Ro', and, and... the boy, and--”

Steven allows for no more room for her tongue. He grabs her shoulder, and the grip is tight enough it kills the sentence dead. What's left of it wheezes in her speechlessness.

“ _Where_?”

“Her rooms. But sai, sai-- She's dead, she's already dead.”

If he hears he doesn't listen. Robert stops in front of her, and touches her where Steven gripped her. She blinks under water.

“Go find Joe, Rosie. Lock down Lady Gabrielle's apartments. We ought to keep this as under wraps as we can. Can thee do this for us, Rosie?”

She nods, swallowing hard. Robert pats her shoulder once, and then is gone to follow in his tet-mates' footsteps.

* * *

With Susan dead, he thought that pain had found its tongue, its language to shape breaths. He hadn’t known. He’d only just learned: the coldness and the terrible cruelty. He’d chosen the Tower over Susan, and so his heart had begun the slow process of its own death. He’d made the choice, he’d taken the penance, he’d covered his head in ashes. This was different. 

Robert Allgood called her _Sunshine_ , when her smile still swelled her cheeks like rain would swell the clouds above the waters of Arten. Now there’s nothing. At the end of the stairs where he walked there was her ghost still covered in blood. Then there was nothing. Past the hallways still ringing with gunshots, into the silent empty Allgood kitchen, and his grief was a deadshroud, his grief was a noose he had tied around his throat and around his father’s and pulled and pulled and pulled, and then the spine had snapped. She’d hit the wall with her blood in her nose and her throat. She’d died like a fox dies wounded on ice, shot once and then shot again to end her misery, the rictus of death clawed in smiles across her face. In the wheezing moments where life was still fighting and it didn’t understand it had been cut, in those few moments where the price to pay was so steep there was no quantifying it, and the smile was the color of dead things left to rot in the water. She had dribbled her grief down her chin in red almost black, and her blue dress had been stained with her stomach and fragments of the ribs four bullets had broken.

The governess had come in. The governess had found them, and she had screamed. Belle had screamed and dropped the fresh linens. They were soaked with blood, now. _Someone will have to wash them again_ he thinks, before the pain engulfs him again.

He closes his eyes and she drops dead and it’s there and it’s there and it’s there, over and over. His mother’s death is endless unsurmountable, and it is tied, blood-pact, with that of her son, and it is tied, blood-pact, with that of the land. Steven mourned her already years before, but then it was a mourning made like rage. Here he is distraught. Here, when he comes in, looking for his wife and finding misery, heralded by Belle’s screams, with Robert and Kit close behind him, he finds Roland clutching his grief in his hands as it overflows past his child’s small fingers.

He is struck still by her in death. Like when she was alive, she is ill-fitting in his reality, something plucked from a dream he never remembered dreaming. So much grief: Henry, and Guinevere, and Roland dead and then returned to life, to them. A love weaned on loss, for a king and a queen of a world that’s only bones. 

His father had ripped Roland’s hands from off her wound, those shaking, shaking hands, and he’d seen his father like this: fragile. Lifting his dead wife past the anger and resentment inside him to hold her, against himself, in a cradle that was tender. Roland grabs again the guns he had dropped and crawls backwards. An animal in the throes of its grief. Something stripped of the flesh of a person.

Roland will remember for the rest of his life the way Steven Deschain’s body bent and folded to hold a wife who was dead. He had not wept. He had held, in silence. On his knees, the penitence red and soaking into his fair-day best. In the grief, all the anger forgotten. All the pain swallowed down with her death. Their gaze meets over her shoulder, past the braids of her hair, and his father sees him, for an instant, and then no longer does.

“Kit?” he says so softly Roland doesn’t know if he’s heard it. But Kit has, and has heard the blankness of the voice. “Kit, fetch Doctor De Curry, if it please ya.”

A beat. Kit Johns sets his jaw. “Right away, Steven.”

She died before anyone could comfort her. She died surprised, she died alone, she died with a violence her body did not deserve. She died and beheld her son to bear witness to her death: his own guns have tasked him with this, this memory-keeping, this remembrance of grief. He does not know where to put it all: it is already so heavy, so burdening, like tar under too hot a sun.

Robert Allgood watches Kit Johns walk down the hallway. Marcia has long taken Belle aside, to comfort her as best she can. Kit Johns walks, does not run: Gabrielle Deschain is dead, after all. The doctor is to come with an assistant, to arrange for the body to be moved. There is no healing needed. When he looks again into Gabrielle’s rooms, the shattered mirror and the wide-eyed boy, he takes a single step forward. It is a simple movement, fluid like water, and he reaches out with both hands:

“Ro, to me. Come here, dear. Here.”

He is the sun. In the darkness that has swallowed Roland whole, Robert Allgood with his outstretched hands and tender voice shines, and Roland stands and half-stumbles. It is easy, when he walks to him, for Robert to slip his hands in his and take the guns, those big irons, that heavy legacy, and then to curl an arm around Roland’s shoulders. Perhaps it is a gunslinger’s duty to bear witness to the horror, _and perhaps the sun is the cradle of life, and we cannot remain in the cradle forever,_ but right now, Robert Allgood chooses tenderness above all else, and turns Roland away from the carnage. Roland lets himself be guided, too docile to be real, away from his father hunched above his mother’s shell. Robert Allgood is _ka-mai_ , and _ka-mai_ dance when the world drowns in blood. 

Yet Roland must look, perhaps to learn again the shape of a grief that will never abandon him. And he does, he does look, over his shoulder, one last time. His gaze to take in the ruin of his youth: and then, after that, only silence. 


End file.
